Like the title character of his most famous production, Bermudian animation legend Arthur Rankin Jr has gone down in history — and the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art will be celebrating this year’s 50th anniversary of the first broadcast of the evergreen TV special Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer with a new Christmas season exhibit.

The upcoming Rudolph show opens on December 6 and will feature the original camera used in the pioneering special, which introduced TV audiences to Mr Rankin’s now-legendary “Animagic” stop-motion animation process in 1964 as well as vintage puppets, sets and many other items relating to the writer/director/producer’s love of Christmas.

Rudolph is now the longest-running, highest-rated special in the history of American network television. Aired annually ever since it debuted, Rudolph will be broadcast by CBS this year on December 9.

This month the US Postal Service issued four new postage stamps to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the family classic with a gala launch in Washington, DC.

Mr Rankin, a Harrington Sound resident, died at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital in January after a short illness. He was 89 years old.

After working as a graphic designer and art director at ABC after service in the Second World War, Mr Rankin began making commercials for sponsors, a sideline that proved so successful that he left the television network in 1952 to form his own company.

Creative partner Jules Bass, who worked for an advertising agency, joined him in 1955, when they formed Videocraft International, later named Rankin/Bass Production

In 1962, Mr Rankin was trying to come up with the basis for an NBC Christmas special for General Electric and thought of his Greenwich Village neighbour Johnny Marks, whose song Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer had been a huge success for Gene Autrey in 1949.

Mr Rankin, Mr Bass and writer Romeo Muller fleshed out a story based on the song, adding a whole cast of characters, including the Misfit Toys. Composer Mr Marks was afraid that his hit could be tarnished if the TV project was a flop, but when it aired on a Sunday afternoon before Christmas that year, the ratings vanquished any fears of failure.

Narrated by Burl Ives, the Oscar-winning actor and folk singer, who is also heard as the voice of Sam the Snowman, Rudolph recounts the tale of a shy reindeer whose Christmas spirit is dampened because his shiny nose has made him the laughing stock of all of Christmasville.

After that debut broadcast, “everyone wanted a Christmas film like Rudolph,” Mr Rankin later recalled.

The result was an entire calendar’s worth of Rankin/Bass animal seasonal specials still aired at Christmas (The Little Drummer Boy, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town and Frosty The Snowman among many others), Easter (Here Comes Peter Cotton Tail), US Independence Day (Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas In July) Thanksgiving (The Mouse On The Mayflower) and New Year’s Eve (Rudolph’s Shiny New Year).

With partner Bass, Mr Rankin later branched out from holiday specials to animated feature films including Mad Monster Party (1967), a tongue-in-cheek mash-up that featured Frankenstein, Dracula, the Werewolf, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and other famous horror movie icons, with voice work provided by classic monster actor Boris Karloff, and the Peabody Award-winning TV special The Hobbit (1977), based on the JRR Tolkien fantasy.

Among the live action TV movies of the week also produced by Mr Rankin and Mr Bass are two shot entirely on location on the Island, The Bermuda Depths (1977) and The Ivory Ape (1980).

“We constructed the plots of those films around Bermuda because I liked to work close to home,” Mr Rankin once joked.

The Masterworks Rudolph show will run through the Christmas season and end on January 13, 2015.

The exhibit will be curated by Paul Pegnato with help from Alana De Silva.